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Ben Domenech, author of the daily political newsletter The Transom.

In an election season full of twists and turns, there was probably no development more detrimental to politics than the proliferation of liberally biased, self-styled “fact-checkers” who actually made the 2012 campaign less, rather than more, fact-based. Ben Domenech, in his must-read daily newsletter The Transom, has compiled a list of the ten worst fact-checks of this year’s election cycle. Among Ben’s most egregious examples relate to the debates about Medicare reform and Obamacare.

(DISCLOSURE: I am an outside adviser to the Romney campaign on health care issues. The opinions contained herein are mine alone, and do not necessarily correspond to those of the campaign.)

“The problem,” observes Ben, “is that a combination of ignorance and bias warps the perspective of fact checkers, and their focus ends up being on their own personal prism of what’s far as opposed to what’s accurate.” Here’s Domenech describing a stubbornly bad piece by Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, in which Kessler declares that nobody dishonestly gains Medicaid eligibility because, well, the Medicaid eligibility rules forbid it:

My first interaction with a fact-checker serves as an indication of how they work and the limits of their knowledge. http://vlt.tc/jvw Glenn Kessler, head of Pinocchio distribution at the Washington Post, wrote a fact-check of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour in which he claimed Barbour was lying when he claimed that people driving BMWs were getting Medicaid in his state. This isn’t a tale confined to Mississippi – it’s a problem all across the country. But when I supplied Kessler with a half dozen news stories from that very week from all across the country about individuals owning McMansions and flashy cars getting Medicaid, but Kessler refused to reconsider his ruling. His rationale was that BMWs are too expensive for people on Medicaid to afford. http://vlt.tc/g6g I’m serious. He did the Cars.com search and everything. In other words, Kessler essentially handed out four Pinocchios to Barbour because in his world, it is impossible for Medicaid fraud to exist.

Sadly, Kessler’s approach to the 2012 cycle proved no more accurate and in some cases even more thickheaded.

The fact-checking Lie of the Year

Let me point to the lowlight of the bunch, what we might call the “fact-checking” community’s Lie of the Year: when PolitiFact described a blatantly deceptive Obama campaign ad on Mitt Romney’s Medicare reform as “Mostly True.” The ad claimed that the Romney-Ryan plan “could raise future retirees’ costs more than $6,000,” when in fact the Romney-Ryan plan would increase future retiree’s costs by exactly zero, and in fact give them the opportunity to lower their out-of-pocket costs.

These aren’t opinions of mine—they are facts, based on the actual design of the Romney plan. The Romney plan, which was rolled out exactly one year ago today, guaranteed that all future retirees would continue to receive today’s Medicare benefits at no extra cost to them. The plan would open up the delivery of those benefits to a broad range of insurers, who would compete to offer those benefits at the most cost-efficient price. This competitive bidding process would drive Medicare costs down without compromising the care that retirees actually receive.

Six weeks after Romney rolled out his plan, Paul Ryan and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) rolled out a nearly identical plan, with the same competitive bidding feature. (It was a previous proposal by Paul Ryan, one that Romney explicitly did not endorse, that the Congressional Budget Office feared would expose seniors to higher costs.)

PolitiFact acknowledged this discrepancy in its report, but then went on to call the Obama ad “mostly true.” Why? After interviewing one person—a senior fellow at a left-wing think tank, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities—PolitiFact decided that “we simply don’t have enough details to know how much extra money seniors might have to pay under the current Ryan plan.” Furthermore, the Obama campaign “gave itself some wiggle room by stating that the plan ‘could’ raise out-of-pocket costs by more than $6,000. On balance, we rate the statement Mostly True.” Wiggle room?

To PolitiFact’s incremental credit, after receiving a lot of criticism for this fact-checking failure, adjusted their rating to “Half True,” and added this paragraph to their report (emphasis added):

But there is one clue that the number wouldn’t be close to $6,400. A study published Aug. 1, 2012, in the Journal of the American Medical Association says that if Ryan’s plan had been in place in 2009, the cost of the second-cheapest Medicare Advantage plan (and thus the size of the premium support payment) would have been 9 percent less than traditional Medicare.

One of the three authors of this study, PolitiFact failed to note, was one of President Obama’s top health-care advisers, Harvard economist David Cutler. But PolitiFact never bothered to interview a right-of-center Medicare expert, such as Jim Capretta.

Ben Domenech’s top ten worst fact checks

But enough about my take. Here’s Ben Domenech's list of the top ten worst fact checks from the 2012 election cycle:

* * *

Choosing the top ten worst fact checks of the cycle proved a difficult task, and there are whole segments I’ve left out because they’ve already been hammered out in the public eye. A few that didn’t make the cut: no one was the deciding vote for Obamacare. http://vlt.tc/jvx Obama didn’t go to Israel but it doesn’t matter. http://vlt.tc/jvy Or get half of his intelligence briefings, but that doesn’t matter either. http://vlt.tc/hhi No one expected that premium cost promise to work anyway. http://vlt.tc/crd Some Republicans wanted to let the auto industry die. http://vlt.tc/4hm Politifact does not understand numbers. http://vlt.tc/jvz Or the Ledbetter decision. http://vlt.tc/jw0 And finally, the general inaccuracies of the welfare reform quarrel deserve a special mention. http://vlt.tc/hbm The turn away from policy experts and reliance exclusively on HHS talking points was jaw-dropping for those who work in the entitlement reform arena. http://vlt.tc/jw1 But then, what do you expect from an approach which believes it has been empowered to identify its own “nonsense facts”? http://vlt.tc/4ou

With no further delay, here are ten different terrible methods deployed by old media fact checkers, and examples of each. They are worse than ads, worse than super PACs, worse than Facebook arguments – so no matter what the outcome of the election on Tuesday, let us work be rid of these fact-checkers by the time the next election rolls around. Fact-based reporting demands it.

10. That thing you didn't say isn't true. http://vlt.tc/jw2 Politifact cannot find a fact to rebut in this Crossroads ad regarding the likelihood of employer dumping into the health insurance exchanges, since it relies on numbers from the Congressional Budget Office (the CBO appears a great deal in these fact checks, so it’s a good thing it has never made a mistake or a miscalculation, and all of its predictions come true). So instead they invent “a novel new interpretation of the ad's meaning” – one surprisingly absent from the ad itself – in order to judge it false.

9. That thing you said is true, but it doesn't matter. http://vlt.tc/jvp One of my personal favorites: Senior Pinocchio Manager Glenn Kessler admits that the CBO calculates the effect of Obamacare will be 800,000 workers dropping out of the workforce. But this doesn’t matter, you see, because Kessler describes 800,000 jobs as “basically a rounding error”. Kessler does this while simultaneously maintaining that the stimulus had a meaningful and positive effect on jobs – “some jobs were created, and many were saved.” Presumably the Washington Post’s headline had the jobs report shown an 800,000 increase would have been “JOBS INCREASE BASICALLY A ROUNDING ERROR."

8. That thing you said could maybe be true, but it won't be soon because things will get better. http://vlt.tc/jw3FactCheck.org only makes one appearance on this list, and I generally consider them the best of the bunch in terms of the fewest obvious errors. Here, they work to rebut Newt Gingrich’s food stamp president claim. There’s a calculation error here which is key, and I assume FactCheck.org people were likely just calculating based on a misreading of the numbers – they ought to have been comparing 14.55 million (under eight years of Bush) to 14.46 million participants under (at the time) 3 years of Obama - which is not, contrary to their estimates, 444,574 fewer (I have no conceivable explanation for how they found that figure). But this less than 100k difference really sticks in my mind because of the unmitigated spritely optimism of the FactCheck.org review, which claims that things are looking up and that more people will come off the food stamp rolls in the near future, perhaps even tomorrow. Now that we have the latest numbers in hand, we see a total of 46,681,833 people on the rolls - which means Obama added 14.69 million participants to the program on his watch... definitively making Gingrich's claim correct. http://vlt.tc/3a0 CNN at least had the decent idea of being more honest about their opinion, labeling Gingrich's claim "true, but not Obama's fault, because Bushlied." http://vlt.tc/jw4

7. That thing you said is true but ordinary people will think it's something false because of your fancy words. http://vlt.tc/jvn Ted Cruz claims national debt is bigger than the nation's GDP. Yes, our national debt absolutely, incontrovertibly exceeds the nation's GDP. But claiming that gets you a "Half-True" because Politifact's Gardner Selby thinks saying it's True is mean. Unrelated, but did you know the 404 page on Politifact is an Etch-a-Sketch? http://vlt.tc/jvo That's half-hilarious! Or rather, hilarious to half the country. They also won the Pulitzer Prize.

6. That thing you said isn't true because we trust this one article we Googled more than official reports. http://vlt.tc/o0 Did you know that no terrorists come into America from Mexico? Pinocchio Distribution Head Glenn Kessler attacked Herman Cain for the claim “We know that terrorists have come into this country by way of Mexico.” According to Kessler, “Cain is wrong. The Houston Chronicle has looked closely at this question and found that *no one arrested at the border* has faced terror-related charges or carried out a terrorist act.” Now of course, as anyone with a brain realizes, that is a very different statement on its face than the one Cain is making. Cain did not say we had *arrested* terrorists at the border. Cain did not say that people *arrested* at the border have carried out terrorist attacks or attempted to do so. Cain’s statement is simply that terrorists have crossed that border. This is supported by, well, the U.S. Department of Justice. http://vlt.tc/o3 And here. http://goo.gl/qqLN3 And here. http://vlt.tc/o1 But what do they know?

5. That thing you said isn't true because everything you say is a lie. http://vlt.tc/jw5 Poor Josh Mandel. If Ohio’s Politifact outfit is to be believed, everything he says is a lie, including this statement. http://vlt.tc/jw6 Perhaps this is due to the primary writer being a longtime Obama supporter? http://vlt.tc/fgq Or that the wife of Mandel’s opponent, Sen. Sherrod Brown, used to work in the office? http://vlt.tc/jw7 But whatever the reason, consider this fact check as a typical entry in the genre: http://vlt.tc/jw8 A Mandel ad which criticizes Brown for "supporting the job-killing cap-and-trade plan" is fact-checked. For proof, the Mandel campaign points to a statement from Brown: “I'm an environmentalist. I want cap and trade. I just want to make sure that the ratepayers in my state don't get socked hard. And that the manufacturing doesn't get crippled.” The ad is deemed False.

4. That thing you said isn't true because it sounds really awful, unless something similar comes up about the guy we hate. http://vlt.tc/jw9 It’s odd how fact checkers shift to considering the motivations of a politician on some occasions, but not on others. Thus, President Obama’s stance against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act can't mean he favors legal protection for infanticide because that sounds really nasty. The phrase “we find it hard to fathom” isn’t typically a sign that you’re fact-checking – you’re just expressing an opinion. http://vlt.tc/jwb However, Paul Ryan is totally in favor of outlawing in-vitro fertilization even though the bill he supported says nothing of the kind, because he’s that kind of person. http://vlt.tc/jwa

3. That thing you said was never true, but you deserve wiggle room. http://vlt.tc/jwc Here’s the rare example of a fact-check so disconnected from reality that outside forces argued it down from Mostly True to Half True: the persistent idea, run in ad after ad, that Romney-Ryan would make seniors pay $6,000 out of pocket for Medicare. In Ryan’s original premium support plan, which pegged the cost of payments to inflation, the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated seniors could see $6,400 in additional medical costs, since they’re rising faster than inflation. But Romney never endorsed that plan, and Ryan later introduced his far more modest premium support plan, based on competitive bidding (where government subsidies are pegged to the level of the second-lowest bid). Thus, this critique was aiming at something Romney never supported and Ryan had since moved on from. But Politifact found that the Obama campaign still had truth on their side, because they deserved, and I quote, "wiggle room."

2. That thing you said is false because I have my own truth. Grand Poobah of Pinocchio Dispersal Glenn Kessler’s claim that Margaret Sanger was a “racial pioneer”. http://vlt.tc/jwd This is a surprising new title for people who called for the “cultivation of the better racial elements in our society” and the “extirpation” of “human weeds”. http://vlt.tc/jwe

1. That thing you said is true but false.http://vlt.tc/jwf Politifact finds Mostly False a Romney campaign claim that women account for 92.3 percent of jobs lost under Obama because context makes it not his fault. Admitting that the “numbers are accurate”, they are nonetheless “quite misleading” because “in every recession, men are the first to take the hit, followed by women. It's a historical pattern, Stevenson told us, not an effect of Obama's policies… There is a small amount of truth to the claim, but it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.” This is simply a long way of saying what Glenn Kessler, Assistant Manager for Pinocchio Affairs, describes thusly, in a summation of all the insight fact checkers have to offer: http://vlt.tc/jwg “TRUE BUT FALSE.”